Nine’s and Three’s

Exams are always a help I say! These hours spent in the loneliness of an examination hall where one cannot talk to even the dearest of enemies and have to spend the entire stretch of unending tick-tock with painstaking concentration on wholly one’s self, can sometimes reveal the funniest of facts – of course, only to the self – and bang the head with the brightest of ideas too!

Well yes, exams are the place for absurdities too! You don’t know why something happens the way it does when in an examination hall. For example, how a bright 16year old sitting through the mathematics paper of the CBSE class 10 boards could not simplify ‘square root of nine’ as three; ahem, + or – 3 as always corrected by my father; is something even beyond his own comprehension. Thereby, he reduces the quadratic equation to a step from where it could have actually been reduced further – yet the 16year old feels completely at peace and perhaps proud too that he did it All alright!

It reminds me of the scene from Taare Zameen Par where the little Ishaan travels in his space craft to Join ‘planet’ 3 with ‘planet’ 9 as an answer to the problem of adding 3 to 9. This has been picked up straight from one of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, which were brought to my notice by a friend – who instead of generating Sales for his company in the crucial month of the last quarter, was actually busy laughing over Calvin and Hobbes sitting on the 19th floor of his office building overlooking computer-wallpaperish scenery of the Pacific bay, sipping on coffee and munching on cookies! Well, he claims he passed one big exam of his life – the IIT JEE, and whatever has followed till date has been the fruit of passing that one exam.

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3 thoughts on “Nine’s and Three’s”

haha…reaaly nice to put up super blunder sort of thing…i agree english is quite “phunny” language …now i realize the importance of the exam i just finished ..abt 3hrs back ..’twas the english exam ….so…the bottom line is ..if you are good at english …maths “can “be made wonderful ;-D

Ah’haa… well what do i say to this one… just that its the 36th floor, not 19th. 🙂 I remember I’d written “Hindustan Liver Limited” (yes, with the spell mistake) for “Cod Liver Oil” as the answer to some question in primary school. What?? Anyone could’ve made that mistake, those DD people kept showing HLL ads on TV! And no one mentioned Cod Liver Oil that often.